Last week was a very hectic but creative and fun time! I achieved a fair few things I am proud of and also ran into a few issues. I am going to spread these things over a few posts but I'll mention now what I have been up to! Firstly, I finished my sound replacement for the Arctic. There are a few things I need to fix up regarding some of the scene changes but overall I was happy with the result that I presented. I shall be writing a post later this week about the conclusions I came to and how I shall fix up the issues over the next few weeks. More excitingly however myself and my partner in crime Mike recorded a super interesting, challenging and fun project. In my last blog post I talked about the pre production and planning I had done for the band Aubergine, last week we recorded and filmed their set and we have actually began the mixing stage using analog gear. I'm going to talk through the process of the whole recording day and how everything was executed and the challenges we encountered.
Originally I had a rough idea of how the day would run and that we would be recording by about 6. I had factored in for just about every issue that could go wrong. Mostly this was to do with set up and have dead mics, cables, inserts in the drop box etc. I figured that at least something like this would happen. However these were not the issues we encountered. The major issue at the beginning of the day when we set up was that we had less inputs than we thought. I thought we had 24 but realised that there is only 20 in the NEVE. This meant that we had to condense our mic list. We had a mid/side mic set up in there to capture the drum sound but we replaced this with just one room mic to compensate.
Something that made a huge difference to this original run sheet of the day was that I thought the trumpet/ flute player wasn’t coming in till 4 which meant we might have needed an hour to work out his pedal set up and sound check. This meant that I wasn't expecting us to start tracking until 6 or 7 even. However, when the band came in to drop off their gear and set up at 9am they informed me that the trumpet player had changed his plans around and was now available to come in at 2! This was great timing for us as it gave us heaps of head room to make any adjustments that we would need to during the sound check and not feel like we were pushed to get all the three takes done in a short amount of time.
We asked the band to come in early in the morning with their gear so they could set up and go have a break before coming in to begin sound checking. I had the set all blacked out before they arrived .It took a little bit of time to out the black sheets up for the set but I over estimated how long. I factored in for two hours but because we had already done it before to practice the lighting it only took me about half an hour! This gave us time to go over our mic list and gear before the band arrived with the gear.
The band arrived with their gear at 10am. This gave us literally hours to set up mics around the drum kit. It was great working with the drummer while we were able to do this with no pressure of time and I really felt that Mike and I were able to take our time with placement for both sound and for the drummers convenience. I learnt a lot about going through the process of working out how to best run the day. I felt really bad asking the band if we could get their drummer to come and set up early to we could build the set, camera shots and mics around him. However he was more than happy to come and do this so that we did have all that extra time to set up and sound check. I think that the result showed that it was worth it in the end. It also meant that after we had all the gear (barr the trumpet/flute) we could set up and have a break and talk about the souch checking and recording process.
After we had the bass, drums and two keyboards set up we were able to starting miking everything. We printed out our mic and input list to work from. It was a very easy process to start with the drum kit as we both knew exactly what we were going for with the drum mics after have several discussions about our mic list.
There were a few changes on the day however. Here is the FINAL mic list we used on the day! (see previous one in last post)
We changed our minds about the set up of the flute and bass a fair few times with the band and before we recorded didn’t really know anything about this flute/ trumpet set up. I don't think this was the bands fault the band organiser Oli had told us that Harold their trumpet/flute player would be playing hit flute through an effects rig and had his own mic that clipped on the flute and trumpet he would bring. He mentioned that it would not be necessary to have any kind of close miking for these as they effects pedal was so heavily affected that we could just take a stereo DI out of this and it would be fine! However we catered for some time to work this whole system out as we knew that he would need to change the mic over from his trumpet to the flute however many times in the set and were not sure if we needed another mic to make this easier. I am glad that we had this extra time because this setup was a little more intricate than we originally planned.
We chatted to the flute/ trumpet player about how he wanted to run the set up. He was a very experienced musician and has been playing this trumpet and flute for a very long time. I feel like he was a little upset that we seemed like we were unprepared for the recording process for this setup. This was of course because we had been given the wrong information about how it was run. He explained to us that the flute actually has two sound holes and they would both need to be captured in some way but only one of them was going to be run through the effects pedals. So, we realise that our set up of just taking a DI wasn’t sufficient enough and that the effects can’t be that crazy if we need a dry signal also. We quickly thought on our feel to work out some miking techniques that would work for this. We got a clip on instrument mic and taped it to the top sound hole of the flute. This is where the more direct signal was going to come from so we plugged this into the pedal board then took the stereo signal out of here to the drop box. As for the other sound hole we decided that with the use of more of a room miking technique we could get an over all imaging of the drums and the dry signal of the flute that would be a good to blend in. This mic captured more of the drum sound than expected but sounds great and ill explain how we are planning to use this in the mixing process later. So this was the first flute which was only used in the first song.
He also had a second flute that had three different sound holes. Two at the top and the same sound hole at the end of the barrel. So, we needed another mic that he could play into and more around accordingly to where the sound would be coming out of the two top sound holes. We had another clip on mic which we put on a mic stand so that Harold could play into it as he needed to between to two sound holes. We moved the C414 closed to the sound hole on the barrel of the flute for this last track to get some of the more natural sounds. This worked well I think considering the lack of knowledge we had about this instrument. We should have had a session for him to come in and play but that still wouldn't have helped with having too close mic the sound while competing against a drum kit in a live setting.
Here is a diagram I made to show how we recorded the flute:
For the trumpet songs which were the three in the middle of the set Harold had his own mic in which clipped onto his trumpet. This was how we were expecting to run this set up so this was not a problem. We took the stereo DI out of the pedal board. The only thing is that while we were recording as Harold needed to unplug his flute from the pedal board in between songs we just had to make sure we turned all the gain down on the signal in the control room. Other than this the changes were pretty seamless. I went in to the live room before the last song to adjust the C414 and make sure the slip on mic was in a comfortable position for Harold while is was playing.
As for the Bass we originally thought that they wanted to play through a bass amp and take a DI signal but on the day they rocked up with no bass amp so we just DI’d it and it sounded really great. The bass player Henry had a really nice P bass that he had recently had a set up and re-fret on so there were no pops on the frets just a really nice clean warm bass tone that were are able to work well with while mixing.
So after sussing out a sound check and adjusting a few mic's around the drum kit and the flute it was time to record! We did our first take at around 4:30 pm. After sound checking which went really well once we were going. The only thing we need to adjust was some drum mics but they were only minor. The flute and trumpet both sounded clear which is what we really needed. Our main concern was that there would be a lot of spill form the drums and to be honest at times there was. But this is something we knew would be an issue and have worked out some ways we can fix it while mixing. But it is a lot more clean and clear that I thought it would be so that's great! We knew that we were only going to be able to get three takes out of the band so we needed to time it well. The set is 27 minutes long so we knew they would need breaks in between. This worked well because there was some people filming down stairs who came and asked us to stop playing at a few points sometimes it worked and sometimes we were able to do a take and I said that we couldn’t stop (soz).
There is little issues while we were recording. Sometimes there were some issues with headphones and such but it didn’t affect the performance at all and we resolved the issues quickly. There was no trouble with the audio until the last take of the last song and the bass player we abit hard on the slap and the DI clipped. This will be easy to fix in the editing however.
Working with the film crew Max and Hudson was such a crazy experience. They were amazing the lighting was perfect and they were super fun to work with. I was extremely impressed with their creative input into the project and their vision for the footage. Watching them work was actually amazing. Watching them capture amazing little music moments on camera that we could hear in the studio was something I wasn’t expecting to be so cool. I can not wait to see some of the footage. All photos of the band used in this post are screen shots of the graded footage.
We finished our final take at around 8:30 this was waaaaay earlier than we expected. Which was great! There was no changes to the audio through out the three takes we mostly just gave a few producing notes such as the effects used on the flutes what we preferred the sound of! It was such a nice experience this whole day I felt like even though there were a few hiccups with headphones mixes and working out how to run the trumpets and flutes that I was fully in control the whole time. Myself and Mike we soooo stoked after the recording day everything sounded, looked and felt amazing while we were watching all our hard work pay off!
I'll be posting about our last mixing session very soon!
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